House and Garden 
raw materials. Mr. F. Inigo 'Thomas, an ar¬ 
chitect, has devoted much personal attention 
to the casting of large ornamental urns with 
which to decorate his formal gardens. In 
France, M. Pierre Roche has gone farther 
and has cast in lead his large sculptural 
pieces, “'The Virgin and Child” and “ Lot’s 
Wife ” ; while his large fountain, “ L’Effort,” 
exhibited in plaster at the Salon of 1896 and 
purchased by the State, was conceived with 
this end in view, the Minister of the 
Fine Arts ordering the group to be cast in 
lead. A model of the completed work was 
exhibited at the Grand Palais in 1900. 
In America the practical role of sheet lead 
is manifold. And yet there is no more 
striking example of successful lead casting 
than in the linotype machine, where the 
day’s news is rendered into type-metal in 
the space of a few seconds. In the manual 
training schools of the country, also, lead 
casting is daily practiced by the pupils; but 
it is regarded as a makeshift in order to 
teach them general foundry work as applied 
to iron without the great cost of equipment 
which operation in the latter would involve. 
Considering the service performed by the 
dull metal, so frequently spurned in fact and 
figure for its more valuable and glittering 
fellows, it is surprising that the decorative 
use of cast lead is a craft which still remains 
almost untried in this country. Beyond the 
fact that our foundrymen are, and will long 
remain, less artistically skillful than those of 
Europe, the cause of our inattention is a lax 
experimental temperament. 
A GERMAN CLOG KM AKER AND HIS WORK 
By E. N. Vallandigham 
I N a quaint little shop on a side street not 
far from Madison Square lives and works 
a German clockmaker to whom his trade is 
as an art. He has made and mended clocks 
for forty years, and in that time has been a 
genuine journeyman, traveling and plying 
his trade in many lands, and absorbing as he 
traveled the tra¬ 
ditions of his oc¬ 
cupation. Ger¬ 
man as he is, he 
places English 
clocks above 
those of any 
other country. 
French clocks, 
indeed, he recog¬ 
nizes as marvels 
of mechanism, 
but he finds 
them delicate and 
difficult to man¬ 
age. A good 
English clock he 
can regulate to 
about two min¬ 
utes a month; a French clock he believes 
can hardly be guaranteed to keep time within 
two minutes a week. 'The difference, he be¬ 
lieves, is largely due to the fact that the best 
French clocks are furnished with pendulums 
that oscillate within a relatively short arc, 
and are therefore easily thrown out of proper 
regulation by a 
slight change 
from the hori¬ 
zontal. When 
he regulates a 
French clock he 
insists upon plac¬ 
ing the clock in 
the spot where it 
is to stand, and 
he corrects the 
level not by plac¬ 
ing beneath the 
clock bits of ma¬ 
terial that may be 
removed the first 
time a careless 
maid dusts the 
mantel, but by 
EARLY AMERICAN “ BANJO CLOCKS 
